On cellos and their possibilities

Early in the summer, a friend arrived on my doorstep with a ¾ size cello on her back. She’d had every intention to learn to play when she inherited it from another friend, and now I have every intention for someone in my home to learn to play. How many instruments live this life, moving unplayed from one home to another, nestled in velvet, waiting like Sleeping Beauty? The desire born of possibility, like a fairy tale prince’s necrophilia. 

There are no empty corners for this cello in our house, but I’m thrilled just seeing it leaning against the bookshelf like a 1980s heartthrob.

Let me explain more clearly my intentions for this cello. There are people who understand limitations, sensibly planning for the end of things: shopping life insurance options, wondering how much toilet paper they have left; and then there are those of us who can’t actually see endings much less plan for them. For us, possibility is rampant. Even at my life’s midpoint, I can’t fathom how things will end: the tube of toothpaste at my sink, my children’s worship of my body, this summer: my belief in the immortality of all things an utter betrayal of my nominated atheism. It’s a form of optimism that rarely serves anyone. Squeeze the tube harder! There’s more in there!

An inability to see endings is, I believe, correlative to an inability to accept that which is unlikely. My children and I will learn many instruments and many languages, despite most of us suffering from tone-deafness. (My to-do list for this summer included learning Ancient Greek, perhaps while a child was learning the cello.) Don’t tell me—even on my deathbed—I’ll never be a pop star. This is to say, even if it never happens, no sonata ever comes from its strings: I have the best of intentions for this cello.

When my friend leaves after dinner, I open the cello’s case, a kiss of hope for this inanimate object. And running my fingers over her strings, I’m shocked by the sensitivity of my finger pads. While I think of myself as a hardworking person—if a little flaky—things like cello strings remind me of what I’ve never accomplished. (Not yet.) But I like the firmness. To be able to pull on something and have it respond but not yield entirely to its player, the agreement that it must never fully yield for music to happen: it sounds a bit like friendship, or marriage. 

I look up what it’s like to play a cello—not how to play a cello, I don’t really plan to learn on a 3/4 size cello, but I want to inhabit the body of a cellist for a minute, via Google. AI gets there first with a surprisingly embodied response:

Playing the cello can feel like a deeply immersive and physically engaging experience, where you're essentially "hugging" the instrument and using your whole body to produce a rich, resonant sound, often described as a warm, full-bodied tone that can be both expressive and calming; many players feel a strong connection to the instrument, almost as if it's an extension of themselves when playing. 

Scanning down the search page, I learn the first string has its limits. And don’t we all? Is this the cello’s lesson to me, a person refusing to see the limitations of people and things? A peanut butter jar can only yield so much to the scraping spoon; a person can only do so many things, only live so long.

I come back to that AI response: there’s something about an instrument nestled between the knees, treated tenderly, like a child, like an extension of self. That devotion, surely, is limitless? One might fall in love with a cello, I think.

In Jungle, Upton Sinclair calls the cello a “dull broom, broom”, perhaps a commentary on the limited first string. But to me the dullness sounds like cloudiness, it feels like an excuse to stay inside for the day, provides a muted softness to the shrill demands the violinist in us makes to go and to do and to go and to do ad infinitum until we die. My children love a band called 4 Cellos. Their schtick is to play unexpected covers, Metallica's “Nothing Else Matters”, Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger”, and the like. We listened to them driving across Cornwall this past spring, the only band to save us from Taylor Swift and “The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny”. The rearrangements are far better accompaniment to fields of wheat, and it’s shocking how much more than a dull broom, broom four cellos can accomplish.

Now say “cello bow” aloud. In your mouth, the effort of the first unvoiced post-alveolar affricate ch- rewarded by the plosive burst of bow, that final long O defying its single syllable: a well-wish to the world.

Five years ago, former CEO of Nissan Carlos Ghosn escaped in a cello case. He’d been on house arrest for false accounting, had all three of his passports confiscated. But he had a party one night, brought in a quartet, and with the help of his wife and former secret-service agents, he took a private plane from Tokyo to Beirut via Istanbul, curled up in the cello case. It’s a rich person’s getaway which I’d normally be inclined to resent. But the creativity of it was its own pleasure. And what interested me even more than the creativity of the escape was whether the musicians were in on it—did one of them lend a cello case? Classical musicians always seem so honest to me, their wood and strings so tenderly held; how could they help a rich guy funneling money? What new possibility! I might be swindled by a violinist, might be convinced to blow up my life by a flutist. They just seem so true.

After plucking the strings, I lean the instrument against the couch, and try to climb into the case, draw my legs up like an ampersand, or a fetus. I still don’t fit. But maybe ¼ more will hold me?